Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, announced in a post on its official website that the company will merge two AI labs, Google Brain and DeepMind, to form a new division, Google DeepMind.
The new Google DeepMind division will be led by Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, and Jeff Dean, head of Google Brain, will move to the position of chief scientist at Google.
Google Brain was founded in 2011 by Jeff Dean and others to develop AI products for Google, and the "Transformer" technology designed by the research team led directly to the rise of large language models and AI services such as ChatGPT. DeepMind is also the AI lab of Alphabet, Google's parent company, and is a "sister project" to Google Brain. The lab was acquired by Google in 2014.
In the public internal letter, Pichai said, "These changes will accelerate our progress in AI and help us develop more powerful AI systems more safely and responsibly."
Pichai added, "Since 2016, Google has been an AI-first company because AI is the most important way to achieve our mission." Google has long worked to improve its core products with AI, from its search engine, to YouTube, to Gmail, to the camera on its pixel phones, and has been helping businesses and developers harness the power of AI through Google Cloud and demonstrating the potential of AI to address social issues like health and climate change.
In Pichai's view, Google has two world-class research teams to lead the industry forward, and with the support of these two teams, it is ushering in a new era of AI. Google merged the two teams to create "Google DeepMind" in order to ensure that AGI develops responsibly to build "a more robust system" more safely.
"Google DeepMind is expected to significantly accelerate Google's progress in AI by bringing all of its talent together in one team, supported by Google's computing resources," Pichai said. Pichai added.
Going forward, Google Research will continue to lead advances in computer science in the areas of algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability, and responsible AI.
The merger of the two labs does not come as a surprise, as there have been multiple indications that Alphabet has repeatedly tried to use DeepMind's work to accelerate broader AI research going forward and has continued to reduce its independence as an individual department.
As early as March, the media reported that the two AI research teams, Google Brain AI and DeepMind, had reached an understanding and were working together to develop new software. In order to save the extraordinarily high cost of research and development and meet the computational needs of both parties, software engineers from Google Brain AI joined forces with DeepMind employees to work on a "Gemini" project to meet the challenges of ChatGPT.
A few years ago, Google began taking steps to make more practical applications of DeepMind's work, moving its use of AI in healthcare to a division of Google and setting up a team to apply DeepMind's research breakthroughs to its own business.
The establishment of Google DeepMind will certainly accelerate Google's progress in AI research and development with the support of Google's computing resources.